1) Club Penguin — Basic Elements
Game: Club Penguin (mid-2000s penguin-themed MMORPG). You play as a colorful penguin and roam a wide world.
Actions (examples): walking around; using a chat feature; going to different parts of a world map; opening and editing a character profile; going inside buildings; opening shop catalogues; buying items of clothing; buying accessories; buying pets (“Puffles”); going to a “home base” (your “igloo”); buying items to customize your igloo; taking care of your pets in your igloo; interacting with other players (sending messages, trading items, visiting igloos); emoting (jackhammering, dancing, waving, playing instruments); playing Hydro-Hopper (wakeboarding game); playing Bean Counters (coffee bag-catching game); sled racing against other players; ice fishing; minecart surfing; flying in a jetpack; playing Thin Ice and Bits and Bolts (retro-style arcade games); making pizzas; surfing; driving a submarine; painting by letters; DJing; playing Card-Jitsu and leveling up your belt ranks/deck; participating in calendar events; rescuing puffles from the mine; participating in a DDR-based dance contest; becoming a secret agent and leveling up by doing spy missions; launching stunt-puffles in a cannon; making smoothies; meeting island NPCs and getting to “take selfies” with them; and more.
Goals: essentially to earn coins so you can partake in activities and purchase clothing, houses, accessories, and other things to live a “better” penguin life.
Rules: vary across mini-games; plus moderation rules (you can’t say certain things in chat; you can’t cheat by giving yourself extra money; etc.).
Objects: the things you purchase and play with in the world—special clothing, Puffles, event items, etc.
Playspace: Club Penguin Island.
Players: you, NPCs, and all other players in the MMORPG.
2) Thought Experiment, Swap an Element (DDR / Flappy Bird)
Apply the playspace of Dance Dance Revolution to Flappy Bird. Instead of performing dance moves on the pad, you would watch a first-person view of a bird flapping on a screen and you jump at the right point to make the bird jump. This shifts the experience from multi-limb dexterity to timing and precision while watching the screen. Some similarities still remain: you still follow on-screen instructions and use your body to interact with the dance pad.
3) Playground Handball
Now, I’m not talking about Olympic Handball here. I’m talking about Playground Handball. What does Playground Handball look like? Well, a group of players stand in a line and hit a ball down to the ground and the ball will bounce off of the ground and then onto a wall and then back up into the air so that the next person’s turn is then. And then that person must hit the ball again down to the ground, hit it off of the wall, and the next person and the next person and so on.
Why is this a game and not a sport? Well, in my mind, it is a bit of both. I think that this becomes a game especially with the addition of special rules. The goal is to not hit the ball in the wrong way. And that can look like a lot of different things depending on what special rules are added. The actions are hitting the ball or receiving the ball, serving it, or adding special rules.
What do these special rules look like? Well, I’m sure there is some library of them somewhere, but some of the ones that I recall include watermelon, where you would jump under the ball instead of actually hitting it. If my memory serves me correctly there were quite a few more including cherry bomb, in which instead of hitting it onto the ground first you would hit the ball right onto the wall; other ones like black magic and white magic, where you would swipe your hand under the ball instead of hitting it, and you would have to call these rules out loud when you were doing it. And if my memory serves me correctly the person who is at the front of the line—the server—is the one who decides what the rules are, what special rules are added, and they’re allowed to pick several of them.
Now, the objects are the players themselves and the wall and the ball, and the play space is a place for the wall and the ground firm enough to hit a ball onto, and the players are a group of children, I suppose. This space of possibility was enormous-feeling in elementary school because we would just invent our own additional rules, create modifications of the game. I remember creating my own very large modification of the game that everyone would want to play at lunch that I don’t remember hardly any of the rules of now. I wonder if I’ve written it down somewhere. But I do remember there being storytelling elements perhaps and many additional rules, and so it really allowed for this wide net to be cast.
For the real time game, I looked at Pong. Pong is a classic arcade game, and there are very few game states possible.
There is: Service (Center, Top, Bottom // Left Side, Right Side), where the ball spawns and moves towards one of the paddles. If the point is lost, then the ball will go towards the losing player for service. That player then moves their paddle to enact the next state: Return, where the ball ricochets off of their paddle towards the other player’s paddle. This allows the other player to either return the ball or miss, losing a point and gaining a service.
Here’s an example game:
1. Service (Center // Left Side) → Left
Return (Left) → Right → Return (Right) → Left → Miss (Left) → Point Right → Score 0–1
Next Service toward Left (losing player).
2. Service (Top // Left Side) → Left
Return (Left) → Right → Miss (Right) → Point Left → Score 1–1
Next Service toward Right.
3. Service (Bottom // Right Side) → Right
Return (Right) → Left → Return (Left) → Right → Return (Right) → Left → Miss (Left) → Point Right → Score 1–2
Next Service toward Left.
4. Service (Center // Left Side) → Left
Return (Left) → Right → Return (Right) → Left → Return (Left) → Right → Miss (Right) → Point Left → Score 2–2
Next Service toward Right.
5. Service (Top // Right Side) → Right
Miss (Right) → Point Left → Score 3–2
Next Service toward Right.
Etc.
There’s finite possibilities here, you either win the point, or you lose it. The possibility space widens when you figure out the techniques to angling where you will hit the ball, if that even is a possibility (it’s difficult to tell if you have any agency or skill as a player outside of the movement up and down). The space widens as well when you realize the perceived stochasticity of where the ball generates from, and how the feeling is exciting and new when the ball goes in an unexpected direction. I do wonder if the most experienced pong’ers are able to predict where the ball will come from, and if that adds to the strategy.
Then, I looked at a turn based game, cardjitsu from club penguin.
Cardjitsu is a turn-based rock, paper scissors-type card game where two players each have a deck of cards that have number and suit values. The suits are Fire, Water, and Snow (a divergence from many classical trielemental structures!). Basically, both players select a card within 20 seconds, after which the cards are revealed, and fire beats snow, snow beats water (it freezes, somehow) and water beats fire. If there’s a tie, the higher number wins. Players win when they win 3 rounds with either all three of the same element or one of each.
Here’s an example of two rounds of gameplay:
Card-Jitsu — game-state log (example)
Round | P1 card vs P2 card → result | set progress
• R1: Fire-8 vs Snow-9 → P1 wins (Fire > Snow) | P1 {Fire} · P2 { }
• R2: Water-6 vs Fire-7 → P1 wins (Water > Fire) | P1 {Fire, Water}
• R3: Snow-10 vs Water-5 → P1 wins (Snow > Water) | P1 {Fire, Water, Snow} → P1 wins (one of each)
Another:
• R1: Fire-8 vs Fire-6 → P1 (higher number) | P1 {Fire}
• R2: Snow-4 vs Water-9 → P1 (Snow > Water) | P1 {Fire, Snow}
• R3: Water-7 vs Fire-9 → P1 (Water > Fire) | P1 {Fire, Snow, Water} → P1 win
The rules and single action per round create a very clear decision tree that allows the players not to worry about the rules, and allow for some strategy to take place. I do wonder if there’s a solved strategy (playing certain ranks of certain cards) or just guessing and prediction. The play space includes these hidden elements, that you can’t see the cards of the other player, you could possibly intuit based on what their playstyle or hand choices might be, but that prediction is a key to the fun of this game.
